The battles against brutality and power, the struggles to write and to defeat his own demons, the fight and the fury to get his stories heard. For Athol Fugard, all of it has flowed from one simple impulse.

“I’ve always sensed for myself an obligation to bear witness to my time,” says Fugard, the South African playwright laureate and, for the past eight years, San Diego resident.

Over the decades, that witnessing has taken the form of landmark plays that struck at the heart of racial apartheid in his home country — “Blood Knot,” “The Island” and “Master Harold … and the Boys” prominent among them.

Fugard and his fellow theater artists braved government harassment and secret-police surveillance to stage those plays starting in the 1950s, years before South Africa finally began to dismantle apartheid.

Next week, San Diego Repertory Theatre opens director Todd Salovey’s production of “The Road to Mecca,” a Fugard work from the latter part of that period. In contrast to his more explicitly political plays, the 1984 “Mecca” is a more intimate, personal piece, a portrait of an eccentric and seemingly obsessed artist.

But Fugard says it’s a mistake to think the work doesn’t also bear witness to such issues as cultural oppression and personal freedom.

“I don’t know that anybody realizes it, but it’s an incredibly political play,” the 78-year-old writer says, speaking from his Del Mar home in a lilting voiced still accented by his native Afrikaans.

“Mecca” centers on Miss Helen, a reclusive widow in a remote South African town who fashions a fantastical menagerie of sculptural figures — camels, owls and the like — all facing toward Mecca. Her art mixes imagery from various faiths, including Christianity and Islam.

Miss Helen is greeted with resentment and mistrust by the rest of the town, but is befriended by an open-minded young schoolteacher named Elsa, who admires her single-mindedness.

The character is based on a real-life artist, Helen Martins, whom Fugard once lived near in the town of Nieu-Bethesda, about 450 miles from the capital of Cape Town. Martins died by her own hand in 1976. Her “Owl House” is now a South African national monument.

It happens that the creation of “Mecca” was a personal milestone for Fugard. It was “the first play I wrote after I stopped drinking,” says the playwright, who managed to conquer his alcoholism nearly 30 years ago.

“The prime impulse (for the play) was that I wanted to understand the nature, genesis and consequences of a creative energy. And what happens when that energy dries up. The political resonances came after that.”

Fugard adds that “I’ve had one experience of writer’s block in my life, and it was living hell. It was a terror for me.”

The playwright also thinks of “Mecca” as honoring “the remarkable power of women,” saying it’s “no accident that in the course of my plays, if you look at them, there’s a whole gallery of strong women.” He jokes, though, that “having two women talking to each other (as Miss Helen and Elsa do extensively) is an area where fools rush in. I’m very aware of how blunt my instruments are.”

As for the current political relevance of “Mecca,” Fugard says he likes to leave that question to the audience.

But politics remain very much on the mind of the playwright, who has a settled life and family in San Diego (including a 6-year-old grandson whom Fugard calls his window into young America) and still teaches and lectures on occasion at UCSD, but who also returns to South Africa periodically.

A theater in Cape Town was recently named for the national hero, and his play “The Train Driver” premiered there in March. (It arrives at Connecticut’s Long Wharf Theatre next month.) Fugard also has become considerably more famous in this country since his novel “Tsotsi” became an Oscar-winning film in 2005.

But Fugard is troubled by what’s happened in South Africa since the hard-fought triumph over apartheid; parts of the country continue to be roiled by poverty, crime and drug problems.

“With that epic event in my country’s history, I thought I would be redundant as a playwright,” Fugard says. “But I had been fashioned by my apartheid years. I realized that the new South Africa needed the vigilance and engagement and witnessing by artists and writers every bit as much as the old one.

“The news is not good. I’m absolutely, brutally honest about this. Something has been derailed.”

That honesty has taken the form recently of pleas to young dramatists to become more politically engaged, instead of “writing for attention spans of 10 minutes between (commercials),” as he told a British newspaper.

Fugard is asked whether the difficult economic conditions of late might be making not just playwrights but theater companies gun-shy about taking risks on challenging material.

“My response to that is, when South Africa was deep in those very dark years of apartheid, there was no question of us getting (our plays seen),” Fugard says. “By hook or crook, we managed to get them onto improvised little stages, wherever we could.

“Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.”

It comes back again, says Fugard, to the idea of witnessing — an idea fresh in his mind because he’s been rereading the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s seismic work “The Gulag Archipelago,” which Fugard calls “a phenomenal act of witnessing.”

As for a slightly different kind of witnessing: Does Fugard plan to go see “Mecca” at the Rep? The question stokes his playful side.

“It’s a difficult situation,” he says. “What do I do if I don’t like it? Do I go backstage and tell the actors and director that I didn’t like their production?

“Or do I lie?” he asks, laughing.

“But yes, I will, because it’s a play that means a lot to me. And I’m very grateful to the theater for being interested in it. Good heavens — that’s wonderful for me, really.”